Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

Perhaps it was only a matter of time. The pitch presentation for Fyre Festival, the luxury event pitting itself as the new Coachella based in a remote island in the Bahamas, has been leaked.

Over the weekend, Fyre Festival left hundreds of people who had paid between $450 and $100,000 for tickets to the boutique event stranded in airports and without accommodation in the Exumas. Poor food, burst sewage pipes and a distinct lack of headliners saw the festival cancelled on its first day, leaving ticket-holders furious and social media voyeurs mercilessly gleeful.

The festival's website that the co-founders "simply weren’t ready for what happened next, or how big this thing would get". However, the leaked presentation suggests that the brains behind Fyre had engineered the festival to be a viral social media phenomenon, and even paid high-profile social media "influencers" to make it so.

The presentation showed the festival's was "expecting 100 per cent sell out by March 31", a month before the first weekend of Fyre Festival was due to take place. But the reliance on what the brand dubs "Fyre Starters" shows that there was a far greater intention to make the festival as popular as possible.

Six pages of the presentation are dedicated to showing the social media prowess of some of the "400 most influential personalities globally" to launch "a coordinated influencer marketing campaign". The "ambassadors", which included supermodels Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin, singer Ashanti and vlogger Marcus Butler, were offered free access and flights to Fyre Festival in exchange for their support, according to Vanity Fair.

'Fyre Starters'

Some of the more influential, such as Jenner and Hadid, were paid thousands of dollars for sharing the promotion. Many never stated that they were promoting Fyre Festival, and deleted their posts when things started to go pear-shaped in the Exumas. Barely any "Fyre Starters" actually attended the festival, having been warned off by organisers before it started.

Elsewhere, the presentation is riddled with curiosities. The brand seems not to understand how to shorten the term "million" into the single letter "m", claiming instead that it reached "300mm people in 24 hours" thanks to its "Fyre Starters", and "1.5mm media impressions in 48 hours". The festival took place on "$8.4mm of market value land" to host the festival and needed "$25mm to... expand globally".

Furthermore, Fyre bolstered its presentation with nonsensical statements. Aside from referring to its team of staff as the "Fyre Squad", "rockstars" whom had been "crafted to spread Fyre", the pitch even seems to have invented a new word – "ideate".

The festival was always planning to sell out

Fyre's vision was summed up as: "the exploration of the uncharted inspired by and referencing the five elements of the earth".

The brand promised that it would spend the next five years "traver[sing] the globe to find untouched lands and convert them into unparalleled experiences. Through the purchase of significant land, we will utilize the each festival as a major cultural event to bring awareness, visitors and livelihood to the land".

Since the disastrous events of the weekend, the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism have kept the festival site on lockdown because Fyre's commitment to bringing livelihood to the land seemingly didn't involve paying customs duty taxes on the items imported for the festival site.